Alejandra Salemi: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Healing Theology Podcast. We're super excited to have a really special guest with us today. We're being joined by Andrew Hanauer. I wanna tell you a little bit about Andrew before we jump into an exciting conversation. A scary conversation, perhaps, but hopefully also one of hope around polarization, political polarization, and what faith leaders can do to help combat this.
So a little bit about Andrew, he is the President and CEO of the One America Movement, an organization founded by faith leaders to fight toxic polarization. One America supports faith leaders and faith communities to reject toxic forms of division and offer a moral vision that transcends our divisiveness and disconnected cultures.
Under Andrew's leadership, the One America Movement has become one of the largest and fastest-growing organizations combating division in American society, quintupling in size in the past 3 years. Andrew is a frequent public speaker in houses of worship of all kinds and has represented One America before gatherings of the National Governors Association, AmeriCorps, Points of Light, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, just to name a few.
His work has been published and featured on U.S.A. Today, the Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), Salon, the Christian Citizen, and media outlets across the US.
And when he's not fighting toxic polarization, Andrew is seen spending time with his family, coaching Little League, rooting for the Golden State Warriors and the Arkansas Razorbacks, and participating in small groups at his church.
Andrew Hanauer: Thanks so much for having me, appreciate it.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. I'm also just really excited to hear about your work. I don't recall how I stumbled into the One America sphere, but I remember reading about you and just being so blown away by the way that you've kind of taken on a really growing issue that's happening, I think, domestically, sure. But I think across the world, right? There's a growing rate of polarization and people getting really divided and going into their silos and echo chambers. And, you know, I'll say this later in the podcast and my, maybe biased, perspective is that everything is public health. But political division is really a public health crisis. I think, as we're seeing this kind of political movement that is anti-science and anti-best practices. Really getting to the root of the problem at political polarization is really important, for I would say the public health movement, but also for religious communities as well. But anyways, all that to say, how are you? How's your work? Do you wanna tell us a little bit about what's going on in your world these days?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, sure. Well, thanks again for having me, really appreciate it. I'm good. It's Friday. So that's always good. You know, I think it's a challenging year. Right? So we work with faith communities left, right, center. We work with Jewish, Muslim, Christian communities, a lot of more conservative, evangelical communities. And when you have the election that we have coming up.
And then on top of that, you have the war in the Middle East, and how that's impacting communities here in the US. It's tough, and there's a lot a lot of work to do. But I also think that. And I hope we'll sort of get to this a little bit in this conversation. We are flooded with, and I think this is a public health crisis, too. Right? We're flooded with negativity. We're flooded with doom scrolling.
Alejandra Salemi: That's so powerful. Are you? Have you seen your tactics change at all as the November election approaches? Or have you all been doing this kind of pretty systematically since you started 3 years ago?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, well, so actually, I mean, we have we have been our own nonprofit since 2020, but we've actually been around for 7 years. We were just very small before 2021. So we have.
We have gone through some election cycles. I will say for us it's long term. This is not about elections. I think the elections are a flash point where people really feel the divisions in a more acute way.
This year. Our thinking is, we want to create what we call a third space. What is a place in society that feels different then? What we're seeing on social media or on the news.
Maybe, as you said in an Echo Chambers, where we feel like we're surrounded by people who agree with us, or in really toxic places where we are with people who are different. But we're not getting along right.
So we want to create something that's different than that. So we're gonna be holding a series of events around the country. We've set up a new substack online that's intended to be kind of a refuge from social media. I guess you could say.
Alejandra Salemi: That's awesome. Yeah. I guess you know what a beautiful way to combat polarization, of not just getting people to talk to each other, but also giving people hope, like giving people, as you say, like the third space or the break from the never-ending doom, scrolling, just negativity that I think we're consuming.
It almost reminds me of the way that like community, and getting back to our humanity and like embodiment, is such a powerful way of reminding ourselves of like our place in the universe almost, and how not to hate each other seems so silly and rudimentary. But it it's just shocking how out of hand it feels like it's gotten.
You know, as I was thinking about the ways that your work connects with healing theology, I mentioned this at the start of the podcast but I really feel like religion and health spaces have become extremely polarized, oftentimes rooted in the same kind of like religious political extremism. But public health, I think, since the pandemic has become this really interesting kind of enemy of the State in a way, or like enemy of certain groups? Which is really scary. Can you tell us more about how you perceive your work overlapping this umbrella of religion and health?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think I'll say a couple things. One is You can't separate, I think I think the pandemic taught us this right? You can't separate a community health from people's physical health. Right? If we are in healthy communities where people are feeling a sense of belonging inclusion. They're gonna make healthier choices than if they are living in isolation, loneliness, depression. Political polarization is in many ways a manifestation of isolation.
It is a product of people finding belonging in their politics, which is, in my view, unhealthy and I think I think that we believe that the country would be healthier and less divided if the faith community, the the 100 million Americans who go to church or synagogue, or Mosque almost every week or every week. If those communities were as healthy as possible, right in the sense of working together across divides, speaking first from the values of their faith and not from political talking points, etc. So I think there's a connection to public health that's really deep there. About how do we find healthy forms of belonging in their politics, which is, in my view, unhealthy and I think I think that we believe that the country would be healthier and less divided if the faith community, the the 100 million Americans who go to church or synagogue, or Mosque almost every week or every week. If those communities were as healthy as possible, right in the sense of working together across divides, speaking first from the values of their faith and not from political talking points, etc. So I think there's a connection to public health that's really deep there. About how do we find healthy forms of belonging? I also think toxic polarization makes us worse at making choices. So when we are caught up in toxic polarization, we are more likely to, and to to be incorrect about things like, what do other people believe? What are what is factually true about the world? We're more likely to be unable to spot bias, or more likely to be unable to spot things that are not true that are that are presented as true.
And I will say, and this may may be unpopular with with some viewers or not, with others I don't know but I think both sides were guilty of that during the pandemic in significant ways, and I think about certainly there was a lot of of misinformation. And I think to your point about public health being being an enemy for some people right. There was this, this very reaction to some of the stuff around Covid, around the science of it that came from a political place rather than a place of assessing whether it was true. And at the same time I remember a stat that said that something like 50% of Democrats believed that if you got Covid, your chances of going to the hospital were something like 50/50. And the truth is, the chances were more like 3%. So for for people to be that misinformed about whether a virus was more dangerous or less dangerous than they thought, I think speaks to how we allowed politics to guide a lot of these decisions. Closing schools in many cases was a political decision based on the politics of the people who ran the school districts rather than the case numbers of Covid in that area.
and I think there were significant consequences to both sides’ inability to to make good decisions and not let their politics cloud their thinking.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, well, I Oh, my gosh! So many thoughts are coming to mind. I think, as you're talking about the way that our individual health ties into our community health and how it's all interconnected. It makes me think of a model that I think I've brought up in probably one or 2 episodes already, but it's the social-ecological model which is really publicly well used in public health. And it's essentially like an onion. Right. Start with the individual and it ties into our interpersonal relationships, our families, our friends, and then community society, and then policy. And I think you're explaining the lived experience of a model that has been tested time and time again. As far as I mean, polarization goes on both sides. I think you know, it goes back to the necessary component of humanity in this work. Whether we're talking about science or politics or religion, we have to remember that we're human and we're fallible. I mean, I think we forget sometimes that we contradict ourselves all the time, even the most like woke educated person like I consider myself personally to be a pretty educated person, and I am such a hypocrite sometimes. And I think the inability to kind of be humble and recognize that we should change our opinion because we just wanna dig our heels into the ground, I think adds to the kind of growing polarization can. Can you share with us some ways that you've seen some of the experiences that you shared with us play out in the religion health spaces that One America is trying to help mend. I don't know if you've seen anything with conversation leaders, or or in conversations with faith leaders or any experiences you've had over the past couple of years.
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah. Well, first of all, I love. I love that about intellectual humility. I think it's so important. We actually, it's it's fun. It's kind of amusing. But we start some of the programs we do with asking everyone to kind of close their eyes. And then we, we say, you know, go ahead and say this sentence in your head. Of all the 7 billion people on Earth I am the one who is the most correct about what I believe. and people laugh because, like. Of course it sounds ridiculous when you say it, but frankly, let's be honest. Most of us walk around believing that right in some form. and I think there is a lot of humility also to your point about education. You know there is, I think, sometimes a blind spot. The more educated you are actually right to your intellectual humility that that you need to be successful at understanding the world around you. And I know that. I think so. There have been studies about people who are most polarized on the right and left are generally the most educated people. Because they have very strong views, and they feel very sure that they're right. and that's that's, I think, very humbling in some ways, for those of us who who feel like education is a good thing. So in terms of seeing it play out. I mean, I think we you know we watch churches, synagogues, etc. Just navigate the pandemic was really hard. I mean, there was a lot of people who who left Protestant churches to go to different churches because they didn't like the covid policies either direction of their pastor. They we heard we talked to pastors who said, all I talk about all day is masks. Yeah, like every conversation I have with my congregants is, how come you're not doing this, or how come you're doing this about masks? We know that a lot of pain came from that. And it was again to our earlier point about the onion. Right? It's it was the pain of losing people who you've prayed with your whole life. You've you did their wedding, you did their their parents funeral. And then suddenly, because you disagree about the science of the pandemic, they're no longer a member of your church. And that's really deeply personal, and that's really hard. And it's a lot harder to work through those things when you're not in person in community. Right? so we we worked with a lot of faith leaders who were just kind of navigating that. And we we saw some examples of people who. a pastors who did a really good job of leading their congregations through that forest. Sometimes that was finding compromises that worked. But just look, no matter what you do, not everyone, not. Everyone's going to be happy right? No, no Covid policy was ever going to be 100% popular. So it wasn't really about the policy so much as it was about how you led the process that let people understand the policy and feel like they were part of that process. And there's something powerful about finding ways to work with people who you disagree with, to find an end that you can all live with again. Not everything can be compromised. That's not a goal. But I think sometimes it's a recognition that you live like you have a shared future. You live in the same country, or you go to the same synagogue, or whatever it is. You've got to find a way to look together, and that that means you're not gonna get everything you want all the time.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, I you know, as you were talking, it makes me think. And you said this kind of earlier. There's maybe some unpopular opinions that you and I are both going to be sharing on this podcast, but it makes me think about you know, I think. first of all, I love public health. I love my field. I love the work that I do. I also think that collectively, as a public health profession we forget that we don't automatically have people's trust. And we kind of bonk people over the head with statistics and with facts. Right? Quote unquote facts. And expect them to just follow the rules without taking into consideration kind of like a cultural. And just like again, that kind of human aspect of things. And I don't know. III remember, as you know, as we're approaching. Gosh! The 4 year anniversary of the start of the pandemic, which is, mind boggling. I you know, I remember thinking people communities are gonna be so hesitant to any public health policy when historically, we haven't been the greatest right between. If we're talking about just communities of color, we have Tuskegee, we have all of these. I mean the Iud experiments are happened for Puerto Rican women on the island. Most recently, like hysterectomies happening at ICE attention camps. there's there's so many things that public health professionals have had some sort of maybe action towards. And we have to remember that it's our job to bridge that divide as like it's, it's not just religious polarization. It's not just political polarization, but also the fact that in the medical community I would say that we have lost the trust of individuals because we make information really inaccessible, we don't have the greatest history of having true intentions for better outcomes. And I just think it. I just wanna highlight that you talk a lot about like religion and politics. But it's not just that the work is in those communities like healthcare professionals of all types. We have a lot of work to do as well, to kind of mend the the divide and and sew back the fabric that has been ripped.
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, I think if I could just say something about that. II really love that. And I think it's yeah. You have. I mean, earning trust… trust has to be earned right? I also think that politicization of Covid made it so that people defended public health decisions as political decisions rather than admitting that there were trade offs.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think one of the ways that I would argue that we can rebuild this trust is by working with church spaces and working closely with communities that have a lot of trust of individuals. And so I would love to kind of transition into some of that conversation, you know, as as someone working in both public health and church spaces. Combating this information polarization? I wanna talk about social media and kind of the colossal fight that it is to fight the algorithm of social media that I think draws us more into the echo chambers. The algorithm kind of learns, what we want to hear and what we like, which means that we have less interactions with people who think differently than us. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've seen on the topic of misinformation and polarization, and how that's maybe happening on social media, maybe starting in social media. And then how it's bleeding into politics in our society.
Andrew Hanauer: yeah, for sure. So even taking misinformation out of it for a second. I think there's 2 really important things that we have to recognize happen. The first is that we oftentimes get information that's true, but it's only partly true, right? So you're hearing something that may be factually accurate. But you're not hearing the context of why, that happened, what the other side believes, and so forth. And so it's an outrage generating machine, right? You become perpetually outraged at what you see is happening, and sometimes those things are true. But they're not the whole story. The second thing that's happening is we are increasingly living in just completely different worlds online, where we're seeing completely different information. We have a board. Our board is like, our organization is diverse, and it's got you know, Republicans and Democrats, but it also has Christians, Jews, and Muslims. And so, after the attack by Hamas on October 7th we actually had a conversation with our Board members about the Middle East between our Jewish and Muslim Board members. It was really hard. It was something that they felt they could not have done had they not built trust with each other over the last 5, 6 years? Right? The thing that was the most difficult about that conversation wasn't different views on today's events in terms of what should happen next or what the right policy is, or how we make peace. Biggest challenge was that their information ecosystems were just completely different. They were not seeing the same things. And again, many of the things they were seeing were probably true. but they were only part of the truth. So I think that's a really really important aspect of this. I think, in terms of misinformation, that has a huge impact for public health. Right? I mean, you go. I think about this a lot, right? Because I'll I'll sometimes try to figure out if a food is healthy. You go try going in social media to figure out if you know butter is good for you or whatever I'm I'm hoping the answer is, yes, but the you can find whatever answer you want. Right and it is amazing to me how how that is! Actually what most of social media is in some ways right is, it's more that than anything else, because what do people care about the most often times is their own health or their own. Well, being so, they're looking for answers. And it's it's a really really dangerous way to try to parse truth from fiction.
Alejandra Salemi: Hmm. yeah, it makes me think about the importance of You know, I don't know if it's like intuition or critical. Maybe it's critical thinking is the word. I'm looking for the importance of critical thinking in whatever it is that we can seem online, you know, and I would I III don't have a a hot take on like the social media debate, but I will say is that I, my, my world is more in the Academia scholar realm, I guess, and unfortunately I would say the same thing about like published journal articles or published research where one, you know, 10 journals will say this thing about some sort of I don't know supplement, or exercise or intervention, and then you could find 10 other articles about saying the exact opposite about that very topic. And you know, I one of the ways that I move through the world in my public health profession is that I don't feel like it's my job to tell people what to do. It's my job to inform them and empower them to use their critical thinking skills, consider their context, their culture, their environment, and then make the best decision for themselves. And I think in a lot of ways. That's what we're missing with social media is that we take people at face value. People who maybe don't have credentials or don't have like legitimate stake in what they're saying. And we forget that we also have the ability to make decisions about what is being said like that critical thinking piece, I think, has really gone out the window. You know II wanna talk about One America. And the way that you all approach what you're doing, cause it's really interesting, you know, as you're focusing on closing this polarization divide through partnerships with fake communities. You know, I can maybe conceptualize a reason why. But I want to hear you talk about why you chose faith communities of all the spaces where people gather and find solace interfered community. And why did you choose communities of faith and not other spaces for social gathering.
Andrew Hanauer: I think that faith is who we are. It it is who founded us. It is the identity that most of our staff members, and most of our board members hold is sort of like, you know. Why would veterans wanna work with veterans? Like it's that's who we are. That's our community. and I think there's also some things about faith that make it particularly an effective community to work with on this issue. So number one there, as I said, there's about a 100 million of us who regularly attend service. That's a pretty big number. So if we all were moving in the right direction, I think it would have an impact on the country.
But I think it's much bigger than numbers right? I think we see decline in faith attendance. We see people not trusting religious institutions, religious leaders. That's a real significant breakage of trust, and I think in many cases, faith communities and religious leaders have have deserved to have lost that trust. Right? I mean, they've done things that are not trust-building. So if we were able to model for the country a different way of being, of working in community with people who don't look like us, or boat like us, or think like us? If we're able to really live our values out in the world. If you say you believe in Jesus, and you want to love your enemy. You actually love your enemies, and you act that way out in the world. I mean, imagine the impact that would have on our politics or our our society. I think that would have a huge impact in a way that you know other forms of societal association wouldn't have the same impact.
The last thing I'll say is, You know, our faiths have value systems that call us higher than partisan divides. And so it's actually, it's actually written down right in our in our books. so when you're talking to someone about, how do you avoid hating your neighbor, who votes differently than you like. There's literally Scripture about that and so there's something inherent in our.I think, in our and our faith that calls us towards peacemaking, not peacekeeping, not just kind of making sure everyone gets along, but actually really remaking the world towards the way that I think God would want it to be.
Alejandra Salemi: Hmm! That's beautiful, and I'm I'm so thankful for the work that you're doing. I think it highlights. Some of the earlier conversations we had of. There's work to be done on all facets. Politicians have lost our trust, faith. Communities have lost our trust, trust. Public health professionals have lost our trust and Distrust can breed fear and fear can breed extremism and polarization. And so there's again. I maybe I'm harping about the same thing over and over again. But it's returning to our humanity is is, I think, one of the most pressing things that we can do from whatever profession that we're working in. You know I have to ask. I know we've hinted about it already, but I just I there's an election coming up in a couple of months early election, early voting is happening now already. I will use the second to encourage everyone to go out and vote. However, it is that you wanna vote, but I think voting is such a beautiful privilege that we have, and one that should not be tossed aside. And so, as elections start happening, can you tell us about some of the things that you think demand immediate attention, and some of the things that you hope around polarization or around the upcoming election that you are focusing on with your organization?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, sure. I mean, so I think again, like we for us, we're focused on, how do faith communities transcend vision? So forth. And so in an election year? There's a few things that kinda come from that. Right? So the first and the most basic is we wanna avoid political violence. We we should not in this country have to even be talking about whether people are gonna shoot each other over the results of an election or their views on the election. Right? We've had, you know, the attack on Nancy Pelosi. We had someone trying to kill Supreme Court Justice Kavanagh, I mean, these are things that are just not acceptable in our society, let alone some of the violence we saw around the 2020 election, and then on January6th, so in 2020 we led some work with evangelical leaders around that issue, and just calling Christians to say, Hey, no matter what political violence is never acceptable. So we were featured on fox news. We were sort of talking about this work. In in in videos and sort of things that different pastors would do in in conjunction with it. So that's a that's a thing that we may do again in some form, you know. We're still figuring that out. We also do what we call election support forums. So we set up a zoom room and we invite any faith leader who wants to come, or any person who who's part of a faith community? And we'll have a guest speaker. Talk about everything from how do you navigate political divisions in your congregation, or how do you have hard conversations with people who disagree with you? Or how do you? How do you help your congregants, you know, kind of stay away from really negative stuff on social media. And so we'll just set up the room. We'll let people talk. But honestly, there's an expert. But there's also like just a feeling of like, can I just share what's on my mind and kind of be in a place where other people are are sort of going through the same kind of challenges that I'm going through. So we really just want it to be a place that feels supportive to faith leaders because they're they're doing hard work, and a lot of them are burned out and tired and so forth. So we'll be setting up those kinds of events. I think we've already had one this year, and we're going to have them on a regular basis. So yeah, that's a couple of the things we're doing.
Alejandra Salemi: Awesome. Well, we appreciate so much the work that you're doing and appreciate you being on the podcast. I have just 5 kind of furious 5 final questions to ask you that I ask all of my guests. So if you'll bear with me, can you give us a quick summary of how you would? Maybe describe how you find yourself at the intersection of public health and religion?
Andrew Hanauer: I didn't realize until now how interconnected, until you know the last 5 years of doing this work, how interconnected they were! And I didn't realize that loneliness and isolation were gonna be the challenge of our of our time, and also the challenge of our divisions. So ending up in this job, I kind of unintentionally ended up at that intersection.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, the the mental health, like religion, intersection of literature from a kind of academic side, is probably some of the the best literature we have around public health and religion. So there's lots there to read about for sure. If you were talking to someone who is really inspired by One American, the work that you're doing, and wants to do something similar at the intersection of religion, health, and politics. What advice would you give them?
Andrew Hanauer: I would say. See what's already out there. See what's missing. In many ways, we started in part because we saw a gap in what was happening around bringing people together. And so we created something that we thought filled that gap. But I've definitely seen people start something that already totally exists and is really good. So don't do that. Look for the gap, and I think it's like the Venn diagram of like what you care about what you're good at and what the gap is, and I think that's where where you want to find your spot.
Alejandra Salemi: What are what are some ways that you're finding joy these days.
Andrew Hanauer: Well, I love my job, but you know most of my joy is my family. I've got kids, and I as I as you said my bio, I coach Little League, which is awesome. My! My son is on a 11 year old. Travel baseball team, but not a psycho. Really really good travel baseball team, just a good travel baseball team. So I love that. And you know, I think my kids are now old enough that I can talk to them about interesting stuff, and it's not so much just, you know, watching Dora, the explorer. So I find a lot of joy in having conversations and seeing how they're growing into little people.
Alejandra Salemi: That's awesome. On the topic of religion and health. Do you have any recommendation for our listeners? A Podcast? A book shows anything that you think could speak to the work that you're doing in religion, health, and politics.
Andrew Hanauer: That's a great question. I would read the book "High Conflict" by Amanda Ripley. I think if you want to understand the difference between healthy conflict which is totally good and normal, and we should have it, and the kind of toxic polarization that we have today. She does the best job, I think of kind of explaining that. I think it pretty much anything that Michael Wear writes. I would highly recommend so he just wrote a new book. I think it's called the "Spirit of our politics." And I think that's that's fantastic
Alejandra Salemi: And lastly, where can people connect with you?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah. OneAmericamovement.org is our website. We have a bunch of stuff that we do. But we also have something that we're doing this year called the Faith over Division Tour. That's not yet up on our website, but it will be so. We'll be having events around the country that we'd love for you to come to. And we also have job openings and we have ways you can engage. And then we also have a substack that we're running, and we love. If folks are interested in writing for that and sharing something, we are always open to that, and we have a kind of active comment section on that as well. So would love to engage with you in that so you can find us on subStack as well. At at One America Movement, the substack is called At The Table.
Alejandra Salemi: Well, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us, and thanks for being on the Healing Theology Podcast. Thanks to our listeners. If you stick around this far, we appreciate you hanging out and just kind of grappling with these really tough conversations as they're happening in our country. As always. Make sure you like, and subscribe and share with a friend, and leave a review and do all the things that we do on social media.
Alejandra Salemi: Andrew, we'll see you around.
Andrew Hanauer: Thanks. So much for having me appreciate it.
So a little bit about Andrew, he is the President and CEO of the One America Movement, an organization founded by faith leaders to fight toxic polarization. One America supports faith leaders and faith communities to reject toxic forms of division and offer a moral vision that transcends our divisiveness and disconnected cultures.
Under Andrew's leadership, the One America Movement has become one of the largest and fastest-growing organizations combating division in American society, quintupling in size in the past 3 years. Andrew is a frequent public speaker in houses of worship of all kinds and has represented One America before gatherings of the National Governors Association, AmeriCorps, Points of Light, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, just to name a few.
His work has been published and featured on U.S.A. Today, the Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), Salon, the Christian Citizen, and media outlets across the US.
And when he's not fighting toxic polarization, Andrew is seen spending time with his family, coaching Little League, rooting for the Golden State Warriors and the Arkansas Razorbacks, and participating in small groups at his church.
Andrew Hanauer: Thanks so much for having me, appreciate it.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, I'm excited to have you here. I'm also just really excited to hear about your work. I don't recall how I stumbled into the One America sphere, but I remember reading about you and just being so blown away by the way that you've kind of taken on a really growing issue that's happening, I think, domestically, sure. But I think across the world, right? There's a growing rate of polarization and people getting really divided and going into their silos and echo chambers. And, you know, I'll say this later in the podcast and my, maybe biased, perspective is that everything is public health. But political division is really a public health crisis. I think, as we're seeing this kind of political movement that is anti-science and anti-best practices. Really getting to the root of the problem at political polarization is really important, for I would say the public health movement, but also for religious communities as well. But anyways, all that to say, how are you? How's your work? Do you wanna tell us a little bit about what's going on in your world these days?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, sure. Well, thanks again for having me, really appreciate it. I'm good. It's Friday. So that's always good. You know, I think it's a challenging year. Right? So we work with faith communities left, right, center. We work with Jewish, Muslim, Christian communities, a lot of more conservative, evangelical communities. And when you have the election that we have coming up.
And then on top of that, you have the war in the Middle East, and how that's impacting communities here in the US. It's tough, and there's a lot a lot of work to do. But I also think that. And I hope we'll sort of get to this a little bit in this conversation. We are flooded with, and I think this is a public health crisis, too. Right? We're flooded with negativity. We're flooded with doom scrolling.
Alejandra Salemi: That's so powerful. Are you? Have you seen your tactics change at all as the November election approaches? Or have you all been doing this kind of pretty systematically since you started 3 years ago?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, well, so actually, I mean, we have we have been our own nonprofit since 2020, but we've actually been around for 7 years. We were just very small before 2021. So we have.
We have gone through some election cycles. I will say for us it's long term. This is not about elections. I think the elections are a flash point where people really feel the divisions in a more acute way.
This year. Our thinking is, we want to create what we call a third space. What is a place in society that feels different then? What we're seeing on social media or on the news.
Maybe, as you said in an Echo Chambers, where we feel like we're surrounded by people who agree with us, or in really toxic places where we are with people who are different. But we're not getting along right.
So we want to create something that's different than that. So we're gonna be holding a series of events around the country. We've set up a new substack online that's intended to be kind of a refuge from social media. I guess you could say.
Alejandra Salemi: That's awesome. Yeah. I guess you know what a beautiful way to combat polarization, of not just getting people to talk to each other, but also giving people hope, like giving people, as you say, like the third space or the break from the never-ending doom, scrolling, just negativity that I think we're consuming.
It almost reminds me of the way that like community, and getting back to our humanity and like embodiment, is such a powerful way of reminding ourselves of like our place in the universe almost, and how not to hate each other seems so silly and rudimentary. But it it's just shocking how out of hand it feels like it's gotten.
You know, as I was thinking about the ways that your work connects with healing theology, I mentioned this at the start of the podcast but I really feel like religion and health spaces have become extremely polarized, oftentimes rooted in the same kind of like religious political extremism. But public health, I think, since the pandemic has become this really interesting kind of enemy of the State in a way, or like enemy of certain groups? Which is really scary. Can you tell us more about how you perceive your work overlapping this umbrella of religion and health?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think I'll say a couple things. One is You can't separate, I think I think the pandemic taught us this right? You can't separate a community health from people's physical health. Right? If we are in healthy communities where people are feeling a sense of belonging inclusion. They're gonna make healthier choices than if they are living in isolation, loneliness, depression. Political polarization is in many ways a manifestation of isolation.
It is a product of people finding belonging in their politics, which is, in my view, unhealthy and I think I think that we believe that the country would be healthier and less divided if the faith community, the the 100 million Americans who go to church or synagogue, or Mosque almost every week or every week. If those communities were as healthy as possible, right in the sense of working together across divides, speaking first from the values of their faith and not from political talking points, etc. So I think there's a connection to public health that's really deep there. About how do we find healthy forms of belonging in their politics, which is, in my view, unhealthy and I think I think that we believe that the country would be healthier and less divided if the faith community, the the 100 million Americans who go to church or synagogue, or Mosque almost every week or every week. If those communities were as healthy as possible, right in the sense of working together across divides, speaking first from the values of their faith and not from political talking points, etc. So I think there's a connection to public health that's really deep there. About how do we find healthy forms of belonging? I also think toxic polarization makes us worse at making choices. So when we are caught up in toxic polarization, we are more likely to, and to to be incorrect about things like, what do other people believe? What are what is factually true about the world? We're more likely to be unable to spot bias, or more likely to be unable to spot things that are not true that are that are presented as true.
And I will say, and this may may be unpopular with with some viewers or not, with others I don't know but I think both sides were guilty of that during the pandemic in significant ways, and I think about certainly there was a lot of of misinformation. And I think to your point about public health being being an enemy for some people right. There was this, this very reaction to some of the stuff around Covid, around the science of it that came from a political place rather than a place of assessing whether it was true. And at the same time I remember a stat that said that something like 50% of Democrats believed that if you got Covid, your chances of going to the hospital were something like 50/50. And the truth is, the chances were more like 3%. So for for people to be that misinformed about whether a virus was more dangerous or less dangerous than they thought, I think speaks to how we allowed politics to guide a lot of these decisions. Closing schools in many cases was a political decision based on the politics of the people who ran the school districts rather than the case numbers of Covid in that area.
and I think there were significant consequences to both sides’ inability to to make good decisions and not let their politics cloud their thinking.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, well, I Oh, my gosh! So many thoughts are coming to mind. I think, as you're talking about the way that our individual health ties into our community health and how it's all interconnected. It makes me think of a model that I think I've brought up in probably one or 2 episodes already, but it's the social-ecological model which is really publicly well used in public health. And it's essentially like an onion. Right. Start with the individual and it ties into our interpersonal relationships, our families, our friends, and then community society, and then policy. And I think you're explaining the lived experience of a model that has been tested time and time again. As far as I mean, polarization goes on both sides. I think you know, it goes back to the necessary component of humanity in this work. Whether we're talking about science or politics or religion, we have to remember that we're human and we're fallible. I mean, I think we forget sometimes that we contradict ourselves all the time, even the most like woke educated person like I consider myself personally to be a pretty educated person, and I am such a hypocrite sometimes. And I think the inability to kind of be humble and recognize that we should change our opinion because we just wanna dig our heels into the ground, I think adds to the kind of growing polarization can. Can you share with us some ways that you've seen some of the experiences that you shared with us play out in the religion health spaces that One America is trying to help mend. I don't know if you've seen anything with conversation leaders, or or in conversations with faith leaders or any experiences you've had over the past couple of years.
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah. Well, first of all, I love. I love that about intellectual humility. I think it's so important. We actually, it's it's fun. It's kind of amusing. But we start some of the programs we do with asking everyone to kind of close their eyes. And then we, we say, you know, go ahead and say this sentence in your head. Of all the 7 billion people on Earth I am the one who is the most correct about what I believe. and people laugh because, like. Of course it sounds ridiculous when you say it, but frankly, let's be honest. Most of us walk around believing that right in some form. and I think there is a lot of humility also to your point about education. You know there is, I think, sometimes a blind spot. The more educated you are actually right to your intellectual humility that that you need to be successful at understanding the world around you. And I know that. I think so. There have been studies about people who are most polarized on the right and left are generally the most educated people. Because they have very strong views, and they feel very sure that they're right. and that's that's, I think, very humbling in some ways, for those of us who who feel like education is a good thing. So in terms of seeing it play out. I mean, I think we you know we watch churches, synagogues, etc. Just navigate the pandemic was really hard. I mean, there was a lot of people who who left Protestant churches to go to different churches because they didn't like the covid policies either direction of their pastor. They we heard we talked to pastors who said, all I talk about all day is masks. Yeah, like every conversation I have with my congregants is, how come you're not doing this, or how come you're doing this about masks? We know that a lot of pain came from that. And it was again to our earlier point about the onion. Right? It's it was the pain of losing people who you've prayed with your whole life. You've you did their wedding, you did their their parents funeral. And then suddenly, because you disagree about the science of the pandemic, they're no longer a member of your church. And that's really deeply personal, and that's really hard. And it's a lot harder to work through those things when you're not in person in community. Right? so we we worked with a lot of faith leaders who were just kind of navigating that. And we we saw some examples of people who. a pastors who did a really good job of leading their congregations through that forest. Sometimes that was finding compromises that worked. But just look, no matter what you do, not everyone, not. Everyone's going to be happy right? No, no Covid policy was ever going to be 100% popular. So it wasn't really about the policy so much as it was about how you led the process that let people understand the policy and feel like they were part of that process. And there's something powerful about finding ways to work with people who you disagree with, to find an end that you can all live with again. Not everything can be compromised. That's not a goal. But I think sometimes it's a recognition that you live like you have a shared future. You live in the same country, or you go to the same synagogue, or whatever it is. You've got to find a way to look together, and that that means you're not gonna get everything you want all the time.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, I you know, as you were talking, it makes me think. And you said this kind of earlier. There's maybe some unpopular opinions that you and I are both going to be sharing on this podcast, but it makes me think about you know, I think. first of all, I love public health. I love my field. I love the work that I do. I also think that collectively, as a public health profession we forget that we don't automatically have people's trust. And we kind of bonk people over the head with statistics and with facts. Right? Quote unquote facts. And expect them to just follow the rules without taking into consideration kind of like a cultural. And just like again, that kind of human aspect of things. And I don't know. III remember, as you know, as we're approaching. Gosh! The 4 year anniversary of the start of the pandemic, which is, mind boggling. I you know, I remember thinking people communities are gonna be so hesitant to any public health policy when historically, we haven't been the greatest right between. If we're talking about just communities of color, we have Tuskegee, we have all of these. I mean the Iud experiments are happened for Puerto Rican women on the island. Most recently, like hysterectomies happening at ICE attention camps. there's there's so many things that public health professionals have had some sort of maybe action towards. And we have to remember that it's our job to bridge that divide as like it's, it's not just religious polarization. It's not just political polarization, but also the fact that in the medical community I would say that we have lost the trust of individuals because we make information really inaccessible, we don't have the greatest history of having true intentions for better outcomes. And I just think it. I just wanna highlight that you talk a lot about like religion and politics. But it's not just that the work is in those communities like healthcare professionals of all types. We have a lot of work to do as well, to kind of mend the the divide and and sew back the fabric that has been ripped.
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, I think if I could just say something about that. II really love that. And I think it's yeah. You have. I mean, earning trust… trust has to be earned right? I also think that politicization of Covid made it so that people defended public health decisions as political decisions rather than admitting that there were trade offs.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think one of the ways that I would argue that we can rebuild this trust is by working with church spaces and working closely with communities that have a lot of trust of individuals. And so I would love to kind of transition into some of that conversation, you know, as as someone working in both public health and church spaces. Combating this information polarization? I wanna talk about social media and kind of the colossal fight that it is to fight the algorithm of social media that I think draws us more into the echo chambers. The algorithm kind of learns, what we want to hear and what we like, which means that we have less interactions with people who think differently than us. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've seen on the topic of misinformation and polarization, and how that's maybe happening on social media, maybe starting in social media. And then how it's bleeding into politics in our society.
Andrew Hanauer: yeah, for sure. So even taking misinformation out of it for a second. I think there's 2 really important things that we have to recognize happen. The first is that we oftentimes get information that's true, but it's only partly true, right? So you're hearing something that may be factually accurate. But you're not hearing the context of why, that happened, what the other side believes, and so forth. And so it's an outrage generating machine, right? You become perpetually outraged at what you see is happening, and sometimes those things are true. But they're not the whole story. The second thing that's happening is we are increasingly living in just completely different worlds online, where we're seeing completely different information. We have a board. Our board is like, our organization is diverse, and it's got you know, Republicans and Democrats, but it also has Christians, Jews, and Muslims. And so, after the attack by Hamas on October 7th we actually had a conversation with our Board members about the Middle East between our Jewish and Muslim Board members. It was really hard. It was something that they felt they could not have done had they not built trust with each other over the last 5, 6 years? Right? The thing that was the most difficult about that conversation wasn't different views on today's events in terms of what should happen next or what the right policy is, or how we make peace. Biggest challenge was that their information ecosystems were just completely different. They were not seeing the same things. And again, many of the things they were seeing were probably true. but they were only part of the truth. So I think that's a really really important aspect of this. I think, in terms of misinformation, that has a huge impact for public health. Right? I mean, you go. I think about this a lot, right? Because I'll I'll sometimes try to figure out if a food is healthy. You go try going in social media to figure out if you know butter is good for you or whatever I'm I'm hoping the answer is, yes, but the you can find whatever answer you want. Right and it is amazing to me how how that is! Actually what most of social media is in some ways right is, it's more that than anything else, because what do people care about the most often times is their own health or their own. Well, being so, they're looking for answers. And it's it's a really really dangerous way to try to parse truth from fiction.
Alejandra Salemi: Hmm. yeah, it makes me think about the importance of You know, I don't know if it's like intuition or critical. Maybe it's critical thinking is the word. I'm looking for the importance of critical thinking in whatever it is that we can seem online, you know, and I would I III don't have a a hot take on like the social media debate, but I will say is that I, my, my world is more in the Academia scholar realm, I guess, and unfortunately I would say the same thing about like published journal articles or published research where one, you know, 10 journals will say this thing about some sort of I don't know supplement, or exercise or intervention, and then you could find 10 other articles about saying the exact opposite about that very topic. And you know, I one of the ways that I move through the world in my public health profession is that I don't feel like it's my job to tell people what to do. It's my job to inform them and empower them to use their critical thinking skills, consider their context, their culture, their environment, and then make the best decision for themselves. And I think in a lot of ways. That's what we're missing with social media is that we take people at face value. People who maybe don't have credentials or don't have like legitimate stake in what they're saying. And we forget that we also have the ability to make decisions about what is being said like that critical thinking piece, I think, has really gone out the window. You know II wanna talk about One America. And the way that you all approach what you're doing, cause it's really interesting, you know, as you're focusing on closing this polarization divide through partnerships with fake communities. You know, I can maybe conceptualize a reason why. But I want to hear you talk about why you chose faith communities of all the spaces where people gather and find solace interfered community. And why did you choose communities of faith and not other spaces for social gathering.
Andrew Hanauer: I think that faith is who we are. It it is who founded us. It is the identity that most of our staff members, and most of our board members hold is sort of like, you know. Why would veterans wanna work with veterans? Like it's that's who we are. That's our community. and I think there's also some things about faith that make it particularly an effective community to work with on this issue. So number one there, as I said, there's about a 100 million of us who regularly attend service. That's a pretty big number. So if we all were moving in the right direction, I think it would have an impact on the country.
But I think it's much bigger than numbers right? I think we see decline in faith attendance. We see people not trusting religious institutions, religious leaders. That's a real significant breakage of trust, and I think in many cases, faith communities and religious leaders have have deserved to have lost that trust. Right? I mean, they've done things that are not trust-building. So if we were able to model for the country a different way of being, of working in community with people who don't look like us, or boat like us, or think like us? If we're able to really live our values out in the world. If you say you believe in Jesus, and you want to love your enemy. You actually love your enemies, and you act that way out in the world. I mean, imagine the impact that would have on our politics or our our society. I think that would have a huge impact in a way that you know other forms of societal association wouldn't have the same impact.
The last thing I'll say is, You know, our faiths have value systems that call us higher than partisan divides. And so it's actually, it's actually written down right in our in our books. so when you're talking to someone about, how do you avoid hating your neighbor, who votes differently than you like. There's literally Scripture about that and so there's something inherent in our.I think, in our and our faith that calls us towards peacemaking, not peacekeeping, not just kind of making sure everyone gets along, but actually really remaking the world towards the way that I think God would want it to be.
Alejandra Salemi: Hmm! That's beautiful, and I'm I'm so thankful for the work that you're doing. I think it highlights. Some of the earlier conversations we had of. There's work to be done on all facets. Politicians have lost our trust, faith. Communities have lost our trust, trust. Public health professionals have lost our trust and Distrust can breed fear and fear can breed extremism and polarization. And so there's again. I maybe I'm harping about the same thing over and over again. But it's returning to our humanity is is, I think, one of the most pressing things that we can do from whatever profession that we're working in. You know I have to ask. I know we've hinted about it already, but I just I there's an election coming up in a couple of months early election, early voting is happening now already. I will use the second to encourage everyone to go out and vote. However, it is that you wanna vote, but I think voting is such a beautiful privilege that we have, and one that should not be tossed aside. And so, as elections start happening, can you tell us about some of the things that you think demand immediate attention, and some of the things that you hope around polarization or around the upcoming election that you are focusing on with your organization?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah, sure. I mean, so I think again, like we for us, we're focused on, how do faith communities transcend vision? So forth. And so in an election year? There's a few things that kinda come from that. Right? So the first and the most basic is we wanna avoid political violence. We we should not in this country have to even be talking about whether people are gonna shoot each other over the results of an election or their views on the election. Right? We've had, you know, the attack on Nancy Pelosi. We had someone trying to kill Supreme Court Justice Kavanagh, I mean, these are things that are just not acceptable in our society, let alone some of the violence we saw around the 2020 election, and then on January6th, so in 2020 we led some work with evangelical leaders around that issue, and just calling Christians to say, Hey, no matter what political violence is never acceptable. So we were featured on fox news. We were sort of talking about this work. In in in videos and sort of things that different pastors would do in in conjunction with it. So that's a that's a thing that we may do again in some form, you know. We're still figuring that out. We also do what we call election support forums. So we set up a zoom room and we invite any faith leader who wants to come, or any person who who's part of a faith community? And we'll have a guest speaker. Talk about everything from how do you navigate political divisions in your congregation, or how do you have hard conversations with people who disagree with you? Or how do you? How do you help your congregants, you know, kind of stay away from really negative stuff on social media. And so we'll just set up the room. We'll let people talk. But honestly, there's an expert. But there's also like just a feeling of like, can I just share what's on my mind and kind of be in a place where other people are are sort of going through the same kind of challenges that I'm going through. So we really just want it to be a place that feels supportive to faith leaders because they're they're doing hard work, and a lot of them are burned out and tired and so forth. So we'll be setting up those kinds of events. I think we've already had one this year, and we're going to have them on a regular basis. So yeah, that's a couple of the things we're doing.
Alejandra Salemi: Awesome. Well, we appreciate so much the work that you're doing and appreciate you being on the podcast. I have just 5 kind of furious 5 final questions to ask you that I ask all of my guests. So if you'll bear with me, can you give us a quick summary of how you would? Maybe describe how you find yourself at the intersection of public health and religion?
Andrew Hanauer: I didn't realize until now how interconnected, until you know the last 5 years of doing this work, how interconnected they were! And I didn't realize that loneliness and isolation were gonna be the challenge of our of our time, and also the challenge of our divisions. So ending up in this job, I kind of unintentionally ended up at that intersection.
Alejandra Salemi: Yeah, the the mental health, like religion, intersection of literature from a kind of academic side, is probably some of the the best literature we have around public health and religion. So there's lots there to read about for sure. If you were talking to someone who is really inspired by One American, the work that you're doing, and wants to do something similar at the intersection of religion, health, and politics. What advice would you give them?
Andrew Hanauer: I would say. See what's already out there. See what's missing. In many ways, we started in part because we saw a gap in what was happening around bringing people together. And so we created something that we thought filled that gap. But I've definitely seen people start something that already totally exists and is really good. So don't do that. Look for the gap, and I think it's like the Venn diagram of like what you care about what you're good at and what the gap is, and I think that's where where you want to find your spot.
Alejandra Salemi: What are what are some ways that you're finding joy these days.
Andrew Hanauer: Well, I love my job, but you know most of my joy is my family. I've got kids, and I as I as you said my bio, I coach Little League, which is awesome. My! My son is on a 11 year old. Travel baseball team, but not a psycho. Really really good travel baseball team, just a good travel baseball team. So I love that. And you know, I think my kids are now old enough that I can talk to them about interesting stuff, and it's not so much just, you know, watching Dora, the explorer. So I find a lot of joy in having conversations and seeing how they're growing into little people.
Alejandra Salemi: That's awesome. On the topic of religion and health. Do you have any recommendation for our listeners? A Podcast? A book shows anything that you think could speak to the work that you're doing in religion, health, and politics.
Andrew Hanauer: That's a great question. I would read the book "High Conflict" by Amanda Ripley. I think if you want to understand the difference between healthy conflict which is totally good and normal, and we should have it, and the kind of toxic polarization that we have today. She does the best job, I think of kind of explaining that. I think it pretty much anything that Michael Wear writes. I would highly recommend so he just wrote a new book. I think it's called the "Spirit of our politics." And I think that's that's fantastic
Alejandra Salemi: And lastly, where can people connect with you?
Andrew Hanauer: Yeah. OneAmericamovement.org is our website. We have a bunch of stuff that we do. But we also have something that we're doing this year called the Faith over Division Tour. That's not yet up on our website, but it will be so. We'll be having events around the country that we'd love for you to come to. And we also have job openings and we have ways you can engage. And then we also have a substack that we're running, and we love. If folks are interested in writing for that and sharing something, we are always open to that, and we have a kind of active comment section on that as well. So would love to engage with you in that so you can find us on subStack as well. At at One America Movement, the substack is called At The Table.
Alejandra Salemi: Well, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us, and thanks for being on the Healing Theology Podcast. Thanks to our listeners. If you stick around this far, we appreciate you hanging out and just kind of grappling with these really tough conversations as they're happening in our country. As always. Make sure you like, and subscribe and share with a friend, and leave a review and do all the things that we do on social media.
Alejandra Salemi: Andrew, we'll see you around.
Andrew Hanauer: Thanks. So much for having me appreciate it.
